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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXII – gordsellar.com on:
The Esteemed Black Actresses Who Finally Have the Spotlight – The New York Times – Celebrity News on:
“Soon enough, America’s purported indie filmmakers will regale us with a ‘Remonstrating Cody,’ a ‘Defibrillating Schnitzler,’ a ‘Rehumidifying Allison,’ or a ‘Macerating Tennyson.’ Long live the present participle!”
“If Kechiche treats political tragedy, then, it is first by creating abundantly detailed, richly convincing comédie humaine, and nowhere is this more apparent than in what is justly considered his major achievement, La Graine et le Mulet.”
Asian · Essays · Exploitation & Erotica · Genres
A New Solution to Herbert Marcuse’s Old Riddle
Interviews · Writers & Critics
“He fears the ‘Party of God’ because he reads their ‘cultural elite’ and ‘family values’ rhetoric as ‘code for [attacking] the media, the Jews, the homosexuals, the adulterers, people who do not believe in God, people who are better looking than you are — put it all together, you have a poisoned chalice.'”
“Finally, the actors sit before a screen which plays a minimalist version of Eurydice: what will be on the other side of this already unreal scenario?” (on Resnais’ You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet)
Experimental & Underground · Festivals & Awards
“Despite this titillated vision, we experience a slight distance as a result of the period fashions and bodies — the women appear relatively natural and unsculpted by today’s standards.”
“In Fargo, a milieu of livid pettiness and stunted lives, capitalist migraines, and psychotic rampages prevails beneath the veneer of cheesy, Norman Rockwellian Middle America.”
“The final result of this pretentiousness is The Dark Knight Rises, a Batman film in name only, a joyless endeavor that ignores its heritage and puts on airs to conceal the half-baked politics and juvenile head games hiding behind its dark and scowling mask.”
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
“Sometimes the truth isn’t good enough, sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.” — Batman
“In the silent era, the film artifact always stands at greater or lesser remove from our sensory experience of the world, never in concordance. It is for this reason that Jean Epstein saw the coming of sound not as the fulfillment of the cinema but as its end point, drowning the fantastic world of the silent screen in what he called a ‘superabundant banality.'”
If Zita Johan went off into the Gary Cooper Morocco desert with Valentino as a stud MUMMY and there was 50 SHADES OF GREY UN-PC whipping and dominance head games Stockholm Syndrome romance, well that gives you some of the plot. PRE-CODE RULEZ!
Sadly, we report the death of the influential writer, teacher, and film critic, Andrew Sarris (31 October 1928 — 20 June 2012). Sarris will be remembered for bringing the[…]
There are all kinds, types, brands, bits and pieces of chit-chatter to plug one’s ear into should one wish to plumb the misty myths and mysteries of movies and all[…]
Last summer, in the midst of the The Hangover 2‘s disappointingly massive success, another comedy came along, which went on to become something of a triumph of box office girlpower,[…]
Here we go again. Only a few days ago we had Walter Salles’ lumbering, rigidly faithful film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Now we have David Cronenberg’s equally[…]
Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema, Tim Palmer. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2011. Paperback, $28.00. 304pp. ISBN: 978-0819568267 Endemic to any reading of a new work lionizing French cinema is[…]
Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory — Visible Man and The Spirit of Film. Edited by Erica Carter. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. Béla Balázs: Early Film[…]
Among the great might-have-beens of cinema are Greta Garbo as Dorian Gray, Ingmar Bergman directing Barbra Streisand in The Merry Widow, Orson Welles’s The Heart of Darkness, Sergei Eisenstein’s An[…]
